November 13, 2008

Creating and Integrating Bookmarklets with Rails

If your application stores information, one of the most critical keys to success is allowing users to get that information in quick. If the process is a pain, they’ll move on to something else. One way to allow for easy and quick data entry is a bookmarklet. I recently created a couple for an app I am scratching an itch with and thought I would share the results with you.

Two FYIs: For some reason I sniffed twice during the recording, but I decided to leave them both in to add some “reality.” Also, the ND YouTube tab was open because I was going to show how the tumblr bookmarklet works, not because I forgot the tab open.

@jeff – It should automatically preserve line breaks in the database. You just have to make sure you convert the line breaks to paragraphs or something when you output. Try using textilize, acts_as_textiled, or simple_format.